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This is going to be a bit abstract but it’s honestly really worth trying to get your head around if you want a good solid foundation in pointers and referential semantics in general.

Pretty much everybody starts their programming career by doing some Hello World stuff and then moving on to some simple variable manipulation like this:

If you run this code you’ll see that b is equal to 2 but a is still equal to 1. This is known as value semantics or sometimes copy semantics. When we do int b = a we’re making b store a copy of the value stored in a. Subsequent changes to b will have no effect on a.

In reference semantics we’d do this instead:

This would result in both a and *b having a value of 2. Here, a is set to 2indirectly and implicitly through the reference provided by b.

You can read about pointer operators if you don’t understand all those * and & thingies but what’s important here is the idea of references.

In value semantics we’re dealing with objects directly but in reference semantics, a reference provides a link to another thing. The referrer refers to the referent. C pointers are one example of a reference but there are other ways to implement reference semantics – in other words reference is a generic term and pointer is a specific example of a reference.

Referencing in turn is a specific case of indirection, the process of gaining access to one thing via another. The opposite of referencing is dereferencing. There’s more info in my article on C’s pointer syntax.

That’s the top and bottom of references really but if you think about them, they do open up your mind to some fairly deep observations about the world. For example here’s a question about numbers.

Finally, here are a couple of subtleties. See if you can answer them yourself before reading my take on them.

What’s the difference between a variable and a pointer? Both are ‘indirections’. The defining difference is that a pointer is a variable whose value is an address which further indirects to a value whereas a variable indirects to a value in a single step.

What’s the difference between an address and a pointer? Not very much really. Both can be used in the same places e.g.

Behind that deceptively simple definition lurk some pretty hairy pitfalls and subtleties but it’s still the best place to start learning.

In computing, when we’re talking about locations to point to and/or from, we’re really talking about memory addresses. So, given that we’re talking about accessing data at a specified memory location, we should probably start with a basic understanding of how memory is organised and how it works.

If you’re happy with what this diagram represents then you’re good to go, if not you might want a quick tutorial on the basics of memory.

That’s the underlying hardware out of the way, at least for our minimal needs here, so now we can move on to talk about how C implements access to memory in software. If you understand what int *ptr = &value; then you can probably skip ahead to the next paragraph but if not, we need to talk about pointer operators and how to read pointer code.

We glossed over the issue of types when we talked about pointer operations but it’s worth delving a little deeper into how C’s type system integrates with pointers. In addition if you step beyond the basic built-in types you need to be aware of how arrays, structs and pointers to pointers operate.

To use memory efficiently both in terms of execution speed and memory usage. For example, nodes in a linked list point to each other. Deleting an element in an array means moving all the ‘higher up’ elements down by one to fill the gap. Deleting an element from a linked list simply involves changing one pointer.

Dynamic memory allocation. If you don’t know how much you’ll need at compile time or if the stack isn’t big enough you can grab chunks from the heap at run time. You can’t do this using arrays because they have to have their size defined at compile time.

There’s just one little wrinkle you need to know about structs when it comes to pointers. If you have a pointer to a struct and you want to get access to one of its fields then there’s a shorthand: ptrToStruct->fieldName is the same as *(ptrToStruct).fieldName

Arrays are contiguous blocks of memory holding multiple objects of the same type. These can be quite large and passing them into functions in the conventional, by value sense, can be quite inefficient both in terms of memory and processor cycles.

Fortunately, pointers come to our rescue here by allowing us to pass a pointer to an array into a function rather than passing the array itself. That way we only store the array in memory in one place and we just refer to or reference that one location whenever we need access to the data in the array.

Arrays themselves are quite lie pointers in fact. An array variable, for example arr in a statement like int arr[3] = {1,2,3}points to the address of the first object in the array. So int *ip = &arr[0] is the same as doing int *ip = arr

Pointers and arrays are related but not quite the same. For example, suppose we set up a couple of arrays: int arr1[3] = {11,12,13}; int arr2[3] = {14,15,16}; You can then do, as we just saw, int *ip = arr1; However, if you were to assume arrays and pointers work identically then you might think you could do arr = ip; or even arr1 = arr2; or arr = &arr2[0]; but all of those will throw compiler errors.

C is a statically typed language, meaning that we explicitly tell the compiler what type our objects are. For example, in Python, which is dynamically rather than statically typed, we’d write value = 12 whereas in C we’d write int value = 12.

What about pointers then? Given that we write int value1 and float value2 you may expect us to be writing things like pointer ptr or maybe pointer *ptr but that’s not right.

In fact we write int ptr. This states that ptr is an int. It doesn’t state that ptr is an int. The int tells the compiler what type of data is to be found at the memory location pointed to by the pointer; in this case an integer or int.

Pointers just hold memory addresses. So why are data types needed in pointer declarations? What extra data is being stored and where?

Well, pointer type information only exists at compile time. The compiler knows the size of objects types and converts this into raw memory locations in the final output machine code. In this way, explicitly declared pointer types allow programmers to show their intent and compilers to check it but it allows for executable machine code to avoid the overhead of performing these checks at runtime.

Additionally, declared pointer types are needed when dereferencing pointers. They tell the compiler how much memory to read and in what format.

Finally, they allow pointer increment and decrement operations (for example when stepping through array-like structures) to move by the correct number of bytes to the correct memory location.

So pointer types are extremely useful but you might have heard about void pointers – as in void *ptr rather than int *ptr. You can think of these as being generic pointers in the sense that they just point to a chunk of memory and they specify no information about the type of data held in that memory. They effectively bypass the compiler’s type checking mechanisms.

If that sounds scary then your coding sensibilities are developing well. They’re very dangerous beasties. But, when treated with respect, they’re also useful and powerful tools. In practice they’re often used to hold any pointer type, for example it’s perfectly legal to assign a pointer to integer into a pointer to void: int i = 1; int *ip = &i; void *vp = ip;.

You wouldn’t normally do things like this because you’re throwing away information and taking off your metaphorical safety harness and that’s how kittens die. If you do, you’ll probably want to be explicit about it and use pointer type casts.

Sometimes you do want to go the other way though, from void * to int * For example memory allocation functions like malloc just return chunks of raw, un-typed memory and you usually want to convert this to a specific type; for example int *value = malloc(sizeof *value) will reserve a chunk of raw heap memory the size of an int and then get the compiler to convert it from the somewhat risky void * pointer returned by malloc into a nice, safely typed int * pointer.

The null pointer in C is a bit of an odd beast. It’s a pointer that doesn’t point to anything. Specifically, it doesn’t point to an object in memory and it doesn’t point to a function either.

Now, you might think that’s what you get when you first declare a pointer i.e. the statement int *ptr; creates a null pointer. In fact it probably doesn’t. Instead, it creates an uninitialised pointer, essentially a pointer with a value (N.B. not a pointee) set to whatever happens to be in the memory where it is created. Those contents could have a value that points to somewhere in memory or they could have a value that represents the null pointer. So what does a null pointer representation look like?

According the C standard NULL must be defined to be either a zero valued integer constant or such a constant cast to void *. In other words NULL can be defined as either 0, 0L or (void *) 0. Interestingly, there may be a variety of null pointers, one for each pointer type, but as far as your C code is concerned, null pointers are represented by the value zero.

What happens when you try to dereference a null pointer, as in int *ptr = NULL; int val = *ptr;? Bad things. You’ll get a run-time error. But this is a good thing in many ways. What you really don’t want to be doing is dereferencing an uninitialised pointer, because they contain garbage and dereferencing that will probably just give you more garbage and operating on garbage, and random, non-repeatable garbage at that, will often give you silently erroneous execution that can cause all sorts of functionality issues.

Pointers, as you would expect given the not insignificant clue in the name, point to something. Although that’s not necessarily as obviously true as you might think. They point to the memory word at the address specified by the contents of the pointer. This is often referred to as the pointee. That’s all fine and dandy from a conceptual standpoint but how do we get from one to the other in the real world of code?

We have two operators in C: and &. Certainly to begin with the best advice I can give you is to think of as the ‘what’s at’ operator and & as the ‘where is’ operator. You can connect the two thoughts together by thinking of & as the opposite of *. When you get more familiar with these things you’ll want to refer to them by more grown up names, pretty much entirely so you can bill more to your clients; because in fact there’s nothing wrong with the terminology I just gave you.

Terminology aside, if we have the name of a normal, non-pointer variable, we can use the address-of operator & to return the memory address of that variable. Here’s some sample code to illustrate:

You can run the code here if you want to see the output and/or experiment. My output was The address of val is: 0xbfc3ef8c where the 0xbfc3ef8c is in hexadecimal format. Your output address will almost certainly be different. Try checking the output of repeated runs. Do you get the same address each time? What does that tell you about the underlying software and hardware? Is this behaviour likely to be the same on all machines? Try adding more variables and see whether there’s a pattern in their output addresses.

Bear in mind that pointers are just variables too so we can do exactly the same operation on them, even though it might take a bit to wrap your head around:

Here we have &ptr pointing to ptr which contains &val which points to val which contains 1234.

You might have noticed that I just skipped over discussion of the * in that code What’s going on there?

Well, we can also go in the opposite direction to &. If you want the big bucks, this is called dereferencing and is the act of getting the value stored at an address, or in other words, the value in the pointee. We can do this using the * operator, also known as the indirection or dereferencing or value-at-address operator, or in our original terminology, it’s the ‘what’s at’ operator.

One final but important note about pointer operators – you need to read pointer code quite carefully until you get used to it. int ptr says that ptr (the thing pointed to by ptr) is an int. int pointedto = *ptr says pointedto is an int that contains the value pointed to by ptr.